Basicsynth
Creating a Music Synthesizer in Software
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Books on music synthesizers explain the theory of music synthesis, or show you how to use an existing synthesizer, but don't cover the practical details of constructing a custom software synthesizer. Likewise, books on digital signal processing describe sound generation in terms of complex equations and leave it up to the reader to solve the practical problems of programming the equations. BasicSynth takes you beyond the theory and shows you how to create a custom synthesizer in software using the C++ programming language. The first part of the book explains the basic computer algorithms used to generate and process sound. Subsequent chapters explain instrument design using actual synthesis instruments. The example instruments are then combined with a text-based scoring system and sequencer to produce a complete working synthesizer.
Customer Reviews
Insightful, presents filters & oscillators optimisations in a way rarely seen
It is not always the case that wandering on the Internet trying to find cogent answers to burning implementation questions, you strike gold.
I had low expectations when purchasing this book. Boy! Was I wrong!
Just the way table length optimisations can make the difference between a 4 operators and a 8 operators FM generators, or the down to earth filter explanations (adding/subtracting the samples to themselves, possibly via a delay line) is worth much more than the price of this book.
You'll get over the "Windowism's" in no time, when you finally realize that the math that had kept you from even understanding the basics, are just used by people not understanding as deeply as the author does, what is the essence of a filter,or an echo line,or a flanger!
I wish I had read this book years ago: there are so many implementation mistakes I would not have made!
Not all the book is of the same quality though, and the "notelist" part shows an over reliance (and the useless, incidental complexity -- parsers) on XML which is just as plain stupid in the music realm as it is anywhere else.
But all in all, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to implement a modern synthesiser from scratch.